Emiliania huxleyi

Scanning electron microscope images of Emiliania huxleyi coccospheres from a bloom in the South West Approaches, June 2004. They have been digitally coloured to show the individual coccospheres.

Dip a bucket in the ocean almost anywhere in the world and you will recover a few hundred or maybe tens of thousands of cells of the coccolithophoreEmiliania huxleyi.

It is one of the most beautiful and widespread unicellular organisms, and in early summer it forms enormous blooms around the edges of the northwest european shelf.

Species detail

Emiliania huxleyi is one of the youngest species on Earth. It only appeared around 250,000 years ago, about the same time as Homo sapiens, and it is even more widely dispersed, occurring throughout the world’s oceans.

This minute, single-celled planktonic alga basically floats around in the upper layers of the ocean dividing and photosynthesising. However, it has a few remarkable properties:

It produces beautiful intricate calcareous plates (coccoliths).

It can grow explosively to produce massive blooms of milky water detectable from space.

It has a Cheshire Cat-like ability to escape from trouble by changing form.

Although Emiliania huxleyi only lives in the top part of the ocean where photosynthesis can take place, it can be found in almost every ocean around the world. Learn more about this coccolithophore's ability to thrive in a wide range of environments.

A satellite image taken in June 2004 of an algal bloom off the coast of Cornwall, UK and Brittany, France.

Scientists have named alternative models for the relationship between Emiliania huxleyi and the viruses that infect it ‘Red Queen evolutionary dynamics’ and ‘Cheshire Cat dynamics’, inspired by the behaviour of the characters in the book Alice in Wonderland.